56 posts from May 2005

May 31, 2005

When I was a junior, I took a course on the history of modern architecture. Taught by David Brownlee, who at the time was a young, rising star in the Penn art history department (and has since gone on to be one of those professors who define an institution-- a few years ago he drove the creation of Penn's college house system), it was one of those classes that changes the way you see the world. Right after the midterm I went to New York City, and was amazed at how many of the buildings I either recognized by name (hey, that's the Lever House! there's Saarinen's CBS building! that's a Paul Rudolph!) or by style (New Brutalism, yuck).

One fun thing about reading John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said is that, if you live in the right place, the book provides a similar experience. It just happens that I live in the neighborhood where most of the book's action takes place-- in other words, where the concept of personal computing was invented. Stanford, where a lot of the key work on AI and timesharing took place, is a couple miles away. SRI, where Doug Engelbart and his group did their pioneering work, is even closer. I take my kids to Keplers Bookstore, which was a magnet for the early 1960s counterculture, for story time every Saturday morning. The offices of the Whole Earth Catalog are across the street from the cafe where we go every Saturday after gymnastics.

So the book provides some historical depth to places that I see almost every day. And while it doesn't talk explicitly about it, the book also reveals as aspect of the history of my kids' school that I hadn't appreciated before.

There are hardly any computers at Peninsula School; flag-making and face-painting are about as high-tech as you get. The school itself is a little low-tech, even anti-tech, and has always been so. Yet most of the kids are from families that are in high tech in one way or another, and if you asked them, the parents would say that they consider computer literacy to be an essential element of modern education. It's always seemed a little odd to me, but Peninsula is fundamentally a happy place with many small eccentricities.

Yet the connections between Peninsula World and the computer world turn out to go a lot deeper than I realized. In What the Dormouse Said, I keep running across names that I know from the school: people who had kids at the school, who taught there, who wrote about progressive education, or who still live just around the corner from the campus. Computers may not be in the classrooms, but since the early 1960s they've been talked about in the parking lot, in parents' get-togethers, or sneaking in at night. I once read that some of the earliest meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club were at Peninsula. Suddenly it makes perfect sense: lots of Homebrew people were connected to the school, or just one step removed from it.

It confirms something I realized a while ago: you could write an interesting history of Silicon Valley through the prism of its progressive and private schools. The most impressive power scenes in the Valley aren't board meetings, or dinners at Il Fornaio; they're at swim meets and graduations, and the lines of cars waiting to pick up kids after school.

[To the tune of Genesis, "Follow You, Follow Me," from the album "And Then There Were Three...".]

Markoff is hardly the only person to write on the relationship between the counterculture and personal computing (or the Internet more generally): Stewart Brand and Theodore Roszak both wrote first-hand accounts of the intersection of the two, and Fred Turner is doing some really outstanding work on Brand, the WELL, and Bay Area computer culture.

[To the tune of Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up In Blue," from the album "Biograph (Disc 2)".]

Markoff is hardly the only person to write on the relationship between the counterculture and personal computing (or the Internet more generally): Stewart Brand and Theodore Roszak both wrote first-hand accounts of the intersection of the two, and Fred Turner is doing some really outstanding work on Brand, the WELL, and Bay Area computer culture.

[To the tune of Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up In Blue," from the album "Biograph (Disc 2)".]

Human Events, "the national conservative weekly," has a list of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Interestingly, the Kinsey report and John Dewey's Democracy and Education were rated more dangerous than Das Kapital. And Comte's work on positivism ranks much higher than Origin of Species.

I also like the little, Wikipedia-like summaries:

Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge--who as a liberal Cambridge economics professor wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in the midst of the Great Depression. The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

That's the problem with the administration-- they've been reading too much Keynes!

But my favorite detail is that the piece links to copies of the books on Amazon, with Human Events' Amazon Associates number. So if you click through to Beyond Good and Evil (#9) or The Feminine Mystique (#7), at least you'll be doing a little good in the world.

I'm reading John Markoff's latest book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. Markoff covers Silicon Valley, and the computer industry more broadly, for the New York Times; he's also a Palo Alto native, and his book reflects both his professional interests and (much more indirectly) his own history. It has a slightly elusive personal quality to it: there's nothing autobiographical about it-- Markoff himself isn't a player in the story, and was in middle school and high school through most of the book-- but nonetheless you sense his presence in a way you don't with more conventional histories.

So far, two things stand out in the book.

First, Markoff writes at length about a circle of scientists and engineers who were experimenting with LSD (and to some degree other hallucinogens) in the early and mid-1960s: there was a circle at Ampex, and another centered around Jim Fadiman (a psychologist, author, and nephew of literary lion Clifton Fadiman). But these weren't fuzzy consciousness-raising experiments: many users tried LSD because they thought it could make them more creative. It was all very nerdy yet cutting-edge, in an identifiably Valley way: less "let's become one with the Universe" than "let's figure out how to reconcile quantum physics and relativity." Doping was what you did with semiconductors; dropping acid was something more akin to visiting a really supercharged, life-changing Starbucks-- a quest for something that would help you be smarter, in some really radical way.

Second, the book isn't about the counterculture in the Bay Area; it's very specifically about the Palo Alto-Menlo Park area. Markoff never comes out and says it, but I get the feeling that one of the book's aims is to establish that this area is every bit as important in the history of the Sixties as Berkeley and San Francisco, and maybe even more important. Sure, Berkeley and San Francisco got 99% of the press, and loom larger in the collective memory, but while everyone's attention was focused on Berkeley, the real world-changing stuff was happening down here in supposedly-sleepy Palo Alto.

May 30, 2005

My wife and I went to see Episode III: Revenge of the Sith this afternoon-- her first time, my second. The second time around, the parts that aggravated me at first are just as irritating. Natalie Portman's role is even more limited than I remembered: for the first 3/4 of the movie, she doesn't actually leave the house, like some hysterical Victorian spouse. On the plus side, the good parts-- elements of the betrayal of the Jedi, the last showdown on the volcanic planet, the transformation of Anakin into Darth Vader-- are even better.

Tonight we're watching Return of the Jedi, just to restore balance to the Force. I'm reminded of Geoffrey Nunberg's great question illustrating the rapid pace at which media now change, how many times have your bought The White Allbum? For some reason, I've got four episodes on video (including three on TV-screen size rather than widescreen, I don't know why), and one on DVD. Eventually I'm sure they'll come out with a 6-DVD set of all the movies, which I'll buy. And then what format will they come up with next, I wonder?

Today we took the children to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. After several hours ogling octopi, sharks, giant tuna, and other wonders of the sea, they saw something really interesting: a traffic cop driving around in a three-wheeled vehicle, one of those things that looks about as powerful as a riding mower.

As it passed, I noticed its name: Interceptor. It's a bit like naming a parakeet "Raptor Maximus," or a poodle "Killer." But the kids liked it.

May 26, 2005

I've added a little thing in the footer of each post to facilitate del.icio.us tagging: it's the "del.icio.us it" thingy, after the comments, permalink and trackback. I picked it up from the del.icio.us blog.

[To the tune of Eric Clapton, "Layla/Derek and the Dominos," from the album "Crossroads (Disc 2)".]

May 25, 2005

1. Constantly hint that you are an alien, as in "Reminds me of Zorzootz 4... uh... I mean Venice.". . .
8. Upon meeting him/her, scrape finger across his/her shoulder, taste and say, "You'll do." . . .
11. Repeatedly use the word "milkweed" as an adjective, as in "This has been really milkweed." . . .
20. In an accusing tone, constantly compare your date unfavorably to Gollum, as in, "Gollum didn't smoke." . . .
25. Respond at entirely inappropriate times with "Is that a threat or an invitation?" or "Do the math."

Blogs — once seen as the domain of crabby movie fans and conspiracy theorists — are moving increasingly into the mainstream, with roughly one in three Americans saying they've read a weblog at least once, a new poll suggests.

I love the "domain of crabby movie fans and conspiracy theorists" line.

May 24, 2005

I confess to mixed feelings about linking to the article, and running the risk of spreading the meme. However, there's a serious argument in here that's worth noting. From the Guardian:

I started the week feeling proud to be one of a new breed of woman - the PhDiva. We wear Manolo Blahniks but we also have doctorates. We are shocked by old-style attacks such as those of Prof [Susan] Estrich, because they go entirely against our way of operating. We know that, instead, a little charm and a little cheek will get us almost anywhere.

[To the tune of Baby Einstein Music Box Orchestra, "Sonata In D For Two Pianos, K448, 1st Movement," from the album "Baby Mozart".]

My friend Gregg Zachary argues the merits of caffeine addiction in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Drinking caffeinated coffee is, in the words of one striking phrase in the research literature "a model drug of abuse." Medical evidence is growing that coffee-drinkers are addicted, in the same general way that smokers gain a craving for nicotine. But there is a silver lining here. Coffee may be one addiction you should succumb to.

The main premise of Ibarra’s book is the way traditional career counselors and counseling directs people interested in career change—think and find your “true self” and implement a plan to get a career that accommodates that identity—is all wrong. According to Ibarra, most real-world examples of successful career shifts actually operated in the reverse of that model. Rather than “think and introspect before you act,” Ibarra actually says the first step to any career change is to “act” or to create little experiments to test out your ideas of a new career to reality, evaluate the results, and see if you wish to go any further with each step reinforcing the feasibility of a new career. Hence, Ibarra’s model says that new professional identities emerge in practice—by doing—rather than by the conventional wisdom of self-reflection and introspection. [emphasis added]

My new colleague Anthony Townsend (whose work I've long admired, and who I'm very happy to have as a coworkers) turned me onto this cool little app: iChatStatus, which displays the song you're listening to in your iChat status window.

As a fan of context-awarness and identity projection technologies, I find it really cool. Now anyone who cares to look can seen how bad my taste in music is.

There are also scripts that do this, but iChatStatus seems easier to work with.

Looking at the referrer logs for Future Now, I saw a bunch of inbounds from a blog I'd never heard of. I looked at it, gave it a quick scan, and saw that it was written by someone in Stanford's product design program.

I've been playing around with Google Alerts for the last couple months, after my colleague Mike Liebhold recommended I look at it. I have somewhat the same feeling with it that I had when I first discovered blogs, or got into del.icio.us: the sense of confronting a system that is extremely simple, yet possessing unusual potential.

I set up one to tell me whenever it finds articles that mention "Institute for the Future;" a second for "pervasive computing;" and a third for "Buckminster Fuller." For some reason, I've taken to calling these streams, rather than alerts; the metaphor just seems to fit better.

The first stream ("Institute for the Future"), not surprisingly, is a compendium mainly of technology-related articles in which Paul Saffo is quoted. Not a bad way to track the Institute's public visibility, and occasionally the stream serves up something I wouldn't have found otherwise.

The second stream ("pervasive computing") is mainly industry announcements, usually relating to wearables, with the occasional more substantive article. It's introduced me to a few magazines I'd never heard of before, and a couple useful pieces I wouldn't otherwise have found; but the stream has a higher signal-to-noise ratio than I expected.

With the third, though, something interesting is happening. Obviously the list is picking up articles about Bucky. But there aren't many of those. Far more numerous are the articles that mention Bucky in passing, or mention geodesic domes-- and those articles are all over the map: a review of the new Bruce Mau exhibit, an article on approaches to homeless shelters, a piece about ice sculpture in northern Alaska, an essay on biomimicry and biomechanics, a note on radical critiques of education. References to Bucky get worked into a fairly stunning array of places.

What's going on?

Bucky is both vaguely familiar to a very large number of people, and a passionately interesting figure to a small number of sometimes very strange people. The combination makes the Bucky stream is more like a TV set tuned to a scrambled channel: lots of interesting random stuff, with the occasional bright, distorted image visible for a fraction of a second. It's the sort of quirky combination of appearances that begs for some grand explanation. Looking over it, I can't help but think of social historian Carlo Ginzberg's strange, wonderful book that tried to demonstrate the existence of a secret Euro-Asian witchcraft sect in the late Middle Ages.

It raises a question. Are there terms that you could have Google follow that cross a variety of disciplines or cultures or geographic boundaries? That are connected to a variety of practices or groups that appear to be very different, but actually are connected in some deep way? That, in short, could serve as an early warning system for future trends-- something like a cross between the Naisbitts' work (which draws on content analysis), coolhunting, and del.icio.us?

What words are probes for the future? What keywords point forward rather than back?

The experience of updating pages makes me realize that I'd like to two other things:

1) A button in Ecto that lets me insert a Google News search, or better yet, RSS snippets from headlines (or perhaps a del.icio.us page) at the bottom of a post. That way, a post on "naked sushi" could pull in more timely content on the subject from other sources. That would be cool.

2) Each post should have a list of other posts on my blog that link to it. Categories are good, but direct links indicate a level of intentionality, and a connectedness in the conversation, that would be useful to readers-- and of course, would encourage people to look at other pages.

I've noticed a bunch of hits on my old "naked sushi" post in the last 24 hours. Usually, when I see a spike like that, it's a sign that something is happening in the news that's triggered a bunch of searches; option two is that someone widely-read has linked to some post (almost always either the "Journeyman" or "Super Nanny" posts). This time, all the inbound traffic was coming from search engines, which made me suspect something newsworthy had happened in the exciting area of naked sushi; sure enough, China has banned it, on the grounds that it "insults people's moral quality".

Rather than write another post about naked sushi that talks about this turn of events (a meta-post like this doesn't count), I went in and updated that post. Essentially this is pheremone trail behavior: I've adopted a strategy of not trying to redirect traffic that's finding its way to one page on my blog off to another, but editing and updating the suddenly-popular page. I call this pheremone trail behavior because ants lay down such trails when they look for food; when they find it, they double back to their friends in the anthill, laying down a second trail atop the first; when others follow the trail, they lay down more pheremone, and so on. Essentially, scent strength becomes an indicator of popularity.

So now I often update already-popular posts, rather than write more on the same subject. This, I realized the other day, is somewhat wiki-like behavior: that's a medium in which directing energy at updating existing pages, rather than creating new ones, is common.

It suggests another way in which blogs and wikis may eventually converge-- or at least strategies used for creating content in the one will migrate to the other.

[To the tune of Journey, "The Party's Over (Hopelessly In Love)," from the album "Time 3".]

May 21, 2005

I led a little expedition from the office to Star Wars Episode III on Friday. We were one of many work groups who took off a couple hours in the middle of the day to see the Star Wars series come to its end-- or full circle. Of course, in broad strokes you know what happens; but since I went to the first Star Wars in the summer of 1977, when I was 12, I've been watching this series for most of my life.

The critics (like Anthony Lane in The New Yorker) are right that most of the movie is excessively busy, the acting is so bad calling it "wooden" is an insult to wood, and Hayden Christensen makes Mark Hamill look like Lawrence freakin' Olivier. Yet, my wife and I watched the original Star Wars this evening, and I have to say that while it retains a fresh exuberance that other movies lack, yet is now incredibly familiar visually, Episode III isn't any worse a piece of filmmaking. Incredibly, while the dogfights were landmarks of excitement at the time, now they seem simple and clean (and that's a very good thing): the limitations of special effects in the mid-70s forced Lucas to a level of simplicity that improved his storytelling and composition. But no one compares Revenge of the Sith to the real Star Wars; we compare it to what we remember watching Star Wars for the first time was like, and we now see Star Wars through a dense filter of personal memories, cultural associations, even references to video games and Star Wars books. (I notice certain weapons in the movies more than others: it's because I've used them in the games.) George Lucas can make visually busier and cleaner movies (the new series lacks all the fascinating grubbiness of the first), but I contend he hasn't gotten worse as a director: Carrie Fisher's performance isn't an order of magnitude better than Natalie Portman's.

But there's a real problem with Episode III, which is that Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader is both central to the film and yet strangely under-developed. This is the story of Good Guy Anakin becoming Bad, Bad Guy Darth Vader; and unless you can read a lot into the performance that isn't on-screen, you'll never quite get why Anakin goes over, or fully appreciate why it's so terrible. My argument, which involves some spoilers, is after the jump.

May 18, 2005

I recently bought the new Tears for Fears CD, "Everybody Loves a Happy Ending." I've long been a big fan of theirs-- I listened to "The Seeds of Love" pretty obsessively when I was teaching at Williams-- and had listened to the new CD a couple times at work, thanks to the miracle of iTunes sharing.

I wasn't completely taken with it, but ordered it anyway, mainly out of loyalty. But after a few days, I think it's brilliant It's not the sort of CD you can just listen to casually: it needs a little time to sink in. There's no catchy single on it, but I've never liked TFF's singles as much as their other stuff; instead, what you get is lots of complexity, interesting arrangements, and echoes of late Beatles and early 70s pop-- in a really good way.

I also got Blue Nile's "High" at the same time. It's also terrific, but in a very different way: if Tears for Fears is music that you'd listen to at night while walking around in a shiny, well-lit downtown, Blue Nile is what you'd listen to while looking at the downtown from across the bay, standing at the edge of the old docks, the hulking darkness of the abandoned warehouse behind you.

Back in Caffe Espresso 1929, for some tea and editing. I'm trying to give up coffee, and they have excellent tea here-- the kind that sits in the glass jars until they shovel it into these big teabags.

It keeps looking like it's going to rain, but so far it's just been blustery. Doubtless my son will have something to say about my making him take his raincoat to day care today.

I'm trying like mad to finish up the last bits of a couple projects before diving 200% into my next big thing at the Institute, a research project that's absorbed most of the last couple months already and is going to be my main work for the rest of the year. So I'm pretty much hiding out and writing.

I surfaced long enough to hear John Thackara give a really interesting talk at IDEO, though. Not one of those talks that goes in depth in some area you've never heard of or thought about, but one that brings together a bunch of thing you've heard about, but hadn't thought were connected.

May 15, 2005

Today we went to the Bring School spring fair. After a couple hours running around, the kids were entertained by the ever-colorful Stanford Band, which did an enthusiastic yet (especially for them) remarkably tasteful show.

For a couple years, I've kept a blog about my children. The kids have put up with it-- put up with the endless picture-taking, Daddy scrambling for scraps of paper whenever they do or say something clever-- but only now have they figured it out.

A couple nights ago, my daughter came up to me and said, "Daddy, I'm going to sing a song, and I want you to write it down and put it in the computer. In that place... that place... that thing with the pictures of me and Daniel." She proceeded to sing a variation of "Happy Birthday."

This has happened every day since.

So, in addition to chef, driver, fashion consultant, butler, medic, bank, and referee, I can now add stenographer to my portfolio of parental duties. But it is about them.

I can't wait until my daughter gets her hands on a digital camera and starts asking to put her own pictures up on the blog. I'll have to get her her own Flickr account.

Lexi Lord, who I knew when I was a postdoc at UC Berkeley and she was at UCSF (and who once saved me from a job), writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about being "Outside, Over There:"

Upon entering the nonacademic world... I discovered a strong community of former academics linked by the Internet. Members of that community have generously reached into their own pockets and given the even more generous gift of time to deal with the very serious problems caused by the overproduction of Ph.D.'s in fields from anthropology to zoology.

When I left academe, I was an unhappy professor, but reading blogs like The Escape Pod and Alex Pang's Journeyman: Getting Into and Out of Academe [there goes the essay's credibility!-- ed.], enabled me to reassess both why I had gone to graduate school and what my graduate education had given me.

In academe everyone told me that my doctorate in early modern history enabled me to do one thing: Be a professor. But outside of academe, I discovered that my degree was more versatile. Ultimately, the various blogs and my discussions with other nonacademically inclined Ph.D.'s enabled me to make the transition into a well-paying and satisfying job in the city of my choice.

In the three years since I left academe, the Internet community for former academics has grown. Today an incredible number of Web sites and forums deal with the Ph.D. surplus. Some are for a broad audience. Other sites cater to a specific discipline, including one I helped found for historians called Beyond Academe, as well as others such as Leaving Physics or Philip Greenspun's Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists.

Given the reluctance of both professional organizations and graduate programs to take serious action on the question of overproduction, the efforts of people outside the academy seem to provide the best, and the only real, hope available today for improving graduate education.

The thing that Lexi does a good job of bringing out is how public and connected the discussion of postacademic life now is.

When I left UC Davis in 1996, there were plenty of people who'd left academic jobs for the private sector, but there was virtually no public discussion of the phenomenon, nor were there decent, systematic ways for people who were leaving academic to find each other. (Professional and scholarly societies exist to link practitioners together; there's no scholarly society of ex-academics.)

Consequently, "Journeyman" was one of the first long pieces arguing the virtues of the post-academic life. Because it was almost one of a kind, it got a pretty wide readership. Two other things helped: the start of discussions among some academics (like Elaine Showalter) about the phenomenon, and the growth of the Web, which allowed a lot of people to read it, pass on the link to their friends, post it to discussion groups, etc..

In contrast, today there are an abundance of writings about moving our of academia, people talking about how they've managed the transition, or just opening up a window into their post-academic lives for others to look through. That's a very good thing.

May 12, 2005

the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people.... The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object....

The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life.

[To the tune of The Blue Nile, "I Would Never," from the album "High".]

The present invention relates to apparatus which utilizes centrifugal force to facilitate the birth of a child at less stress to the mother.

It is known, that due to natural anatomical conditions, the fetus needs the application of considerable propelling force to enable it to push aside the constricting vaginal walls, to overcome the friction of the uteral and vaginal surfaces and to counteract the atmospheric pressure opposing the emergence of the child. In the case of a woman who has a fully developed muscular system and has had ample physical exertion all through the pregnancy, as is common with all more primitive peoples, nature provides all the necessary equipment and power to have a normal and quick delivery. This is not the case, however, with more civilized women who often do not have the opportunity to develop the muscles needed in confinement.

...Means are provided to assure the safe delivery of the fetus and to stop the machine immediately upon such delivery. These means comprise a pocket-shaped reception net 88 made of strong, elastic material and supported under tension by tail ropes....

I especially like this Wile E Coyote-like touch:

When the fetus leaves the mother's vagina and lands on the cotton bed 97 in the net 88, its weight, as a result of the rotation of the machine, exerts a radial centrifugal force on the bottom of the elastic net 88. This force on the net 88 presses on the upright switch-out plate 93 causing... an electric switch in the control box 16 to stop the drive motor 15 and the rotation of the whole machine.

And, Mom and baby are in this thing by themselves:

For safety sake, the machine is enclosed in an annular fence 115 capable of excluding all personnel from the reach of the revolving deck.

If I'm reading it right, a user would be spinning at up to 7 Gs.

The incredible thing is, this device dates from 1965, not 1865. Actually, there are lots of incredible things about it. That's just one of them.

You gotta see the pictures (especially Figure 1 and Figure 3) to really appreciate it.

Update: The story gets better. The device won an Ig Nobel prize for Managed Health Care in 1999, inspiring a Mercury Newspiece:

Once [while visiting the Bronx Zoo Blonsky] noticed a pregnant elephant who began to spin herself just before delivery.

"He went back to the drawing board and came up with this design and got a patent for it," said Don Sturtevant....

The Blonsky resembles something from the Inquisition.

"Or perhaps the Russian space program," said Dr. Andrea Dunaif of Brigham & Women's Hospital at Harvard, who will evaluate the Blonsky for the Igs during a follow-up seminar on Monday.... Dr. Dunaif, who once delivered a baby in the back seat of a taxi cab, called the Blonsky "well-intentioned."...

A retired mining engineer born in China of Russian parents, he [George Blonksy] was residing in San Jose when he died in 1985. His widow, known as Aunt Lotte, died in 1998 in a nursing home in Cupertino. They were childless.

May 11, 2005

I have indirect evidence that, in support of his new book The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida is appearing on Arthur, The Wiggles, and other children's TV shows.

This morning, as I was driving the kids to day care, my son noticed some construction going on in our neighborhood: a sidewalk being repaved, a front yard being re-landscaped, a couple houses being rehabbed or replaced.

"Why there all this work?" he asked.

"It's called gentrification," I said. I should have known better.

"What dat?" he asked.

"Well," I said, trying to come up with a definition that didn't involve rising land prices and an explanation of social class, "it's where people do stuff to their neighborhood to make it look nicer."

My daughter piped up, "And they do things to their gardens, and their yards. Or add things to their houses."

Good explanation. She then told me that she wanted to have an addition to our house, and that it should be a new room for her.

Half a block later she returned to gentrification. "And the people who make their gardens and houses nicer have to be very creative people. That makes the whole neighborhood nicer."

What? Where did that come from? Having creative people makes a neighborhood nicer? Gee, where have I heard that before?

Then, as I was turning a corner, she told her brother, "And they invite over their friends."

May 10, 2005

Wade Roush throws his hat into the pervasive / ubiquitous / calm / mobile computing discussion with his new blog, Continuous Computing. Wade is a very smart guy-- though I confess that it's overdetermined for me to think well of any historian of science turned technology journalist-- but a tiny part of me deflates a bit and thinks, Another blog to read?

Actually, for reasons that I can't quite figure out (and it's probably better that I don't try), I'm reminded of a line from The Simpsons:

Homer: Marge, you know whenever I learn something new it pushes out old stuff! Remember when I took that home wine-making class and forgot how to drive??
Marge: You were drunk!
Homer [reminiscing happily]: And how.

I can never remember to pack the bag for my daughter's ballet class, but I can remember stuff like that. I'm doomed.

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "Welcome to the Machine," from the album "Wish You Were Here".]

Just found an amazing Grateful Dead cover of The Band's classic song "The Weight," from their September 4, 1991 concert. It's truly brilliant: soulful, heartfelt, yet also joyous. Plus Bruce Hornsby played piano with them on that tour, and is terrific.

May 09, 2005

In one video clip, labelled Bitch Slap, a youth approaches a woman at a bus stop and punches her in the face. In another, Knockout Punch, a group of boys wearing uniforms are shown leading another boy across an unidentified school playground before flooring him with a single blow to the head....

Welcome to the disturbing world of the "happy slappers" - a youth craze in which groups of teenagers armed with camera phones slap or mug unsuspecting children or passersby while capturing the attacks on 3g technology.

According to police and anti-bullying organisations, the fad, which began as a craze on the UK garage music scene before catching on in school playgrounds across the capital last autumn, is now a nationwide phenomenon.

May 08, 2005

The convention was a success! Unfortunately, we had no confirmed time travelers visit us.
We did, however, have a great series of lectures, awesome bands, and even a DeLorean.

Thanks to the sharp-eyed commenter who noticed the typo in the original title. Open source at its best-- if by open source you mean "let your readers do your spell-checking." Not exactly what Eric Raymond had in mind....

May 05, 2005

Everyone knows the children are our future. Except in cases of nuclear attack. Then it's businesses and adults first. This, at least, is what we gather from our visit to Ready.gov, the Department of Homeland Security's official website for citizen preparedness.

Slate's Timothy Noah has had some funny (and occasionally sobering) articles about terrible, indeed racist, product names. Recently they've mainly been looking to Europe for examples, but this ad shows that it would do well to go East, young critic:

So far as anyone can tell, this is an MP3 player. Featuring, as one friend put it, "a medium-hot man listening to the kickin tunes from pancakes." Pancakes?

But more to the point, how the Hell did this name get past the suits?

And finally, not to put too fine a point on it, why is someone who looks like he just finished his poli sci degree at Brandeis in an ad for a Korean MP3 player?

Thanks for pointing this out, Jason. My whole day is thrown off because of this.

AP: What did you want to be when you were a little girl?
Hilton: A veterinarian, but then I realized I could just buy a bunch of animals.
. . .
AP: Why are you so popular?
Hilton: I don't know, because of who I am. I'm not like anybody else. I'm like an American princess.
AP: What would you be like if you were — I don't know — Paris Smith?
Hilton: I'd be the same. Maybe I'd be a veterinarian.

[To the tune of David Bowie, "Loving the Alien," from the album "Tonight".]

If you don't like getting your paper rejected before it even reaches peer review, ask David Egilman how to get around the process: In what may be an unprecedented move, when the Brown University researcher's paper was recently rejected from an occupational medicine journal, he simply bought two pages of ad space and printed the entire article in the same journal....

"I don't know where he gets this idea that he gets to publish anything he wants in the journal of his choice," [Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine editor Paul] Brandt-Rauf said. "If that were true, I'd publish all of my pieces in Nature and Science."

Actually, it would be probably be cheaper to buy a few pages' ad space in a humanities journal. And I'll bet the reprints would be less expensive, too.

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

"This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness....

Wilson said the IQ drop was even more significant in the men who took part in the tests.

My next book, Rest: Why Working Less Gets More Done, is under contract with Basic Books. Until it's out, you can follow my thinking about deliberate rest, creativity, and productivity on the project Web site.